Thursday, October 8, 2015

Memory Bank - Out of The Unknown

This article originally appeared in Beyond, my free newsletter for lovers of science and science fiction. Sign up here - http://eepurl.com/btvru1

'Get Off My Cloud'

A young boy is terrified to go to sleep because he’s plagued by
nightmares. His dad comfort’s him at bedtime and puts a framed
photograph of a Smith and Wesson revolver on his bedroom wall, telling
him he can use it if the monsters come. Finally lulled to sleep a dalek
appears in the boy’s bedroom shrieking for his extermination. The boy
leaps up, grabs the ‘photographic gun’ from the frame and shoots the
dalek dead. Fast forward a few decades and the boy, now grown up, is
preparing to be thrust into the dreamworld of a science fiction author
who has lapsed into a coma.

That’s the first few minutes of the Out of the Unknown episode
‘Get Off My Cloud’. You can’t watch it anymore, because some years after
the series ended, the BBC wiped quite a few of the tapes and in fact
there isn’t even a complete shooting script left for ‘Get Off My Cloud’.
I only know how that episode played out because I watched it when it
was first broadcast in 1969. I was seven years old and it left a lasting
impression.

Out of the Unknown was a gem of a series, adapting stories by
well-known authors such as Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham, Frederick Pohl,
JG Ballard, Kate Wilhelm and Ray Bradbury as well as generating original
scripted adult science fiction, all in the heady ‘experimental’ days of
broadcast television. You can get a feel for the show by watching the
YouTube trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXMuZ5iGTqk)
for the British Film Institute’s DVD compilation of the remaining
episodes. And if you really feel tempted, the DVDs are available on
Amazon - http://amzn.to/1ENVFaV.

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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks